


The Search

by troof



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Aliens, M/M, astronaut au...but is it really?, except no one wants to go to space, space, they just really want to find aliens, traditional aliens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-06 08:56:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14638449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/troof/pseuds/troof
Summary: Keith trained to become an astronaut. He was doing well, until he fell in love with the AI in the trainer.The hologram had felt so real. Every time he touched Shiro, or Shiro touched him, he felt a solid body there. He felt warmth. And every time he responded to Keith, he reacted to what was said in real time.Then he met the real Shiro, the man in charge of the space company that he thought he knew much about, but didn't remember him at all. At first Keith was hurt, but Shiro offered him knowledge about aliens and the strange meteorite that had landed in his backyard years ago. As it turned out, they were both searching for answers and life beyond.Keith wondered if they were truly compatible, or if they were merely each other's means to an end.





	The Search

This lab had the future in mind: edges crisp, walls streamlined in elegant curves, modern furniture--they were in the business of interplanetary travel, after all. Spaces were designed with balance and the high ceilings and windows conveyed a sense of freedom, but there was another side, too--the part that was cold.

The air conditioning blew steadily to protect the machinery. The sofas in the lounge and in the office spaces were a luxury, but in the lobby, some of the benches lacked seat backs or arm rests for the people that didn’t stay long. The curiosity of people under pressure was a cannibalizing force, and combined with enough drive, it could figuratively cause a person to consume themselves if they had no limits.

Keith shivered when he completed his training and looked forward to the next day. Eight weeks of running, exercising in weird ways that would have been compatible with zero-G, learning again how to eat, how to walk, how to fix the ship’s systems, how to swim in an astronaut suit--all of this was over. He toweled off his hair that was soaked from the pool, and he hung his suit up on the wall to dry. At the beginning, he had been clumsy when putting it on, but now he could take it on and off as quickly as if he had been wearing it his entire life. 

For the past two months, he existed as an astronaut, singularly focused and ready to absorb more knowledge.

Sometimes it got boring, but he had reading to do. And the instructor to talk to. He remembered hurting. When the motion sickness got bad, the man in the tank would allow Keith to lean on his shoulder so he could lead him over to the bed. When Keith’s legs started cramping, he massaged his calves to make sure they didn’t hurt. And the day Keith came out of the isolation tank...he couldn’t remember a handjob having that much sensation even during his first time.

And then he saw him on the outside. He knew that face, with a shock of white hair and a scar across the nose, but always kind. He hurried to catch up.

“Shiro!”

“I’m sorry, have we met before?”

Keith was dumbfounded. This man had been his instructor for the past two months. “Yes..?” No response. "You trained me."

“Which training was it again?”

“The, uh, astronaut track.” Being an astronaut wasn’t as special as it used to be. They had thousands now, but the training was still intense.

“Are you sure? I haven’t actually seen you before…”

Keith was dumbfounded. “What do you mean, ‘haven’t seen me,’ you basically pulled me out of the centrifuge when I was dying.”

And then it clicked. Shiro assumed he must have been referring to the AI they put in every training program to imitate his likeness. “That was a hologram.” They weren’t completely holographic these days, the builders having found how to imitate sensation, but convention still kept the original name.

Keith was silent for a moment, and only then did he dare to respond. “So the things we did...weren’t real?”

The man in there--they fell in love, or something. Several times, Keith asked if they were on camera, but the man said not to worry. Shiro said not to worry. So he didn’t. It was a closed environment, almost like a video game.

 _Was I going mad?_ Keith asked himself.

“No. The things you did were quite real. The training stage is intense. Some people do tend to hallucinate,” Shiro explained, “but when you were in there, you looked fine.”

“But we…”

“I think it’s best if you head over to medical.” Shiro wouldn’t have said anything, but Keith looked quite shaken. His expression was frozen.

“Yeah, I think you’re right,” Keith said, putting his head down and continuing along the way.

The hologram had felt so real. Every time he touched Shiro, or Shiro touched him, he had felt a solid body there. He had felt warmth. And every time he responded to Keith, he had reacted to what was said in real time. He had a past. He had ambitions. In fact, he told Keith about what was going on in the lab while he was busy training.

He told him that he had nightmares, and how he took medicine to stop them, about the neverending search for aliens that had affected his life and for which everything was a cover. All fake.

Fuck medical. Keith was going for a run.

\---

Day 59: Morning

Shiro shaded his eyes in the morning sunlight slanting through the blinds and felt as if he had been up all night. He padded across the carpet to look in the mirror. Luckily, his vision wasn’t funny, his skin was clear, and he had nothing more to show for the night than faint circles under his eyes. He didn’t look as exhausted as he could have. Shiro sighed in relief and steadied himself for another day without answers. 

Shiro contemplated the green pill in his hand and washed it down with a glass of water before he could give it more thought. He would have to stop with this medicine one day. He realized that lots of executives had sleep problems; he just thought his were more serious than most.

There were several times in his memory where he had drifted off to sleep only to awake and feel as if his body had no sense of self--such were the effects of surprise weightlessness on a sleep-addled mind. In his dreams, his skin was shimmering inside the beam of light from the spacecraft that had come to pick him up like a cabbie from his own bed as if he had called it. One night when he was young, he had been taken away in an unfamiliar spacecraft by unfamiliar creatures, and the nightmares had occurred ever since.

They went away gradually as he passed through his teenage years, but they started up again after he began tinkering with spacecraft. In the dreams, they came from another planet and took him away as routinely as the garbage crews on Sunday morning. He felt as if he suffered from a chronic illness. Except it was aliens. Which was worse, because he wouldn’t be believed.

It was okay--they were almost friends now, the aliens and he.

He kept looking, though, and he found people--people like him, who lived in the branded cornfields and knew the airiness of truth, because for a brief moment aboard the ship he saw other humans, strapped to tables in a fishbowl of a room or wandering about in hospital gowns, eyes wide and just as lost as he was.

The first one was a girl named Pidge. She had lost her family at an early age, and it was just their luck to find someone whom no one would miss.

Pidge had her two friends named Lance and Hunk she brought to work here with her, but they didn’t suffer from it. They took her for her word, but from their enthusiasm for the subject and go-getter attitudes, Shiro wasn’t sure they empathized at all.

It wasn’t about striking back at them. On the brief occasions he’d had a chance to wander around their ship, Shiro tried to place where the aliens were from, but to no avail. This endeavor was about empowering the people who had been degraded, escaping the damage that they knew here would come for them. That was what these missions were about...in theory. Life had its complications.

\---

Shiro’s impression of Keith was that he was a test pilot out of the Garrison like the astronauts of old. Bright-eyed with an enviable track record, sometimes there was a loneliness clinging to him in the set of his crossed arms or the set of his eyebrows. Keith worked tightly with Shiro because as he was part of the next mission out of here, it was Shiro’s job to help with the final checklists. 

“I believe in aliens,” Keith said out of the blue, into the vastness of the room. He was typing away on the computer at something Shiro couldn’t see, but at the same time, trying to gauge Shiro’s reaction.

“Me too. Tell me if you see something out there, okay?”

Keith was getting frustrated. He was trying to play it off. “No, I mean really believe.” 

“Really?”

“Why not? There’s two sides to this project. On one hand, you’re working to help people who’ve had an encounter, like you have, and possibly find out if there are any more out there. Half of the people who support it just want to get the human race to Mars just...for the heck of it, I don’t know. Perform some experiments.”

“How do you know I’ve ‘had an encounter?’ Some weird rumors fly around here for sure.”

“Well, _if you have_ , I wouldn’t be one to judge.”

Shiro gave a wan smile. “I suppose so.” He had thought space was cool at one point, too, but sometimes he was overcome with a fear that came from his past experience that was all but an excellent deterrent. “Do you just...believe?”

“No, I found a meteorite in my backyard with markings when I was little. It left a crater ten feet wide.” He remembered how the desert iron melted around the edges and bright rays scarred the modest surface for the viewing pleasure of passers-by, except there wasn’t anyone around for miles.

“What kind of markings?”

“Foreign writing, of sorts. I couldn’t decipher it.”

“If you showed me a picture, I could fax a copy over to someone in cultures.”

“You’re busy with the casualty problem.”

“No, that’s all right, it won’t take more than a minute.”

“Okay, then.” Keith didn’t know why Shiro was taking the time to help him when they had a launch coming up in the next month. Man needed to get his priorities straight. But he twisted his body around in his chair to access the backpack slung over the back and fish out a worn polaroid from its depths. He showed Shiro and waited for a reaction.

“Is this...in a museum?”

“It’s in my bedroom, why?” Keith and his dad had hesitated to touch it for a couple weeks, fearing a radioactive or diseased substance because of the object’s unusual nature, but in the end they took it because they realized if they didn’t that the authorities would.

“Because it’s something I’ve seen before. This comes from the same civilization I’ve been in contact with. Let me run it by Pidge and I’ll give you an answer.”

Keith almost thought it was too good to be true. When he signed on as a scientist he had been selective about who he asked, but no one had been able to give him a lead. He didn’t want to get his hopes up, but Shiro was the first. 

Shiro brought it back the next day and said the message was a warning. Hostile. Stay away. But it wasn’t addressed to the humans. It had fallen here, but it was meant to ward off someone else, far away. 

Keith couldn’t stop grinning. “Can I meet this ‘Pidge’? I feel like I should thank her, at least.” 

“Building G.”

“Got it.”

As soon as he had a free moment, Keith studied the floor plan posted on the wall by his office and headed across the complex to the glass building labeled “Building G.” It was a collection center for various artifacts people shipped to them from across the United States. 

It was hot out today, so he crossed the wide expanse between this building and the next as fast as he could. He pushed open the door and stomped the dust off his boots. 

The receptionist wasn’t in today. In fact, the whole building looked empty. That, or everyone was hard at work. Keith didn’t care. He walked around and knocked on doors until he found the one belonging to Pidge, who was actually a woman named Katie Holt.

“You’re Pidge, right?”

“Just give me one second for this simulation to run, and I can be right over,” the person at the computer answered. One second turned into three minutes, and Keith had begun to count the glow-in-the-dark stars on the door when she spoke again.

“Your face looks familiar. I’m on the expedition with you.”

“You are?” All thoughts of thanking Pidge for the information flew out of Keith’s head.

“Yes. We haven’t met before, but Shiro talks about putting us together.”

“Look, what would I do if I needed to get off our next flight? I can’t think about going to space right now, it’s messing with my head."

Pidge tapped a pencil against her lips as she thought for a moment. “I’m sure you could tell Shiro, it’s not too late.”

“I don’t want to talk to Shiro, right now--” Keith looked over her shoulder at a grid covering a two-dimensional model of herself on the screen and noticed a projector by her elbow.

“What is it?”

“You work with holograms.”

Pidge turned red and rapidly changed the picture on screen. “In my spare time. It’s not exactly what I’m hired here to do, but Shiro saw it one day and thought it would be useful for the training simulator. Other than that, I’m not supposed to be doing it.” She sighed. “We’ve got a lot of things to archive and artifacts to track.”

If Pidge was responsible for creating the hologram Keith trained with, was there a chance she could explain its malfunction? Or what he saw, at least. Maybe he was going crazy. It was worth a shot.

He told her about what had happened in the simulator, expecting her to say it wasn’t possible.

“AI are trained to take on the qualities of a real human being. In the case of Shiro’s hologram, he was given textbook knowledge, memories, and personality traits similar to his model. As we can’t teach them everything, we use prediction techniques to fill in the gaps. They’re a bit new, so...it’s quite possible something went wrong.”

“How would you know if that happened?”

“They record everything, so I would need to see records. Footage.”

\---

Shiro watched the video that Pidge mentioned and he felt sick. It wasn’t all there, but he could read between the lines. To think that his hologram was capable of behaving like this was beyond imagination. It had all of his qualities, but none of the restraint. 

He had heard no complaints of behavior like this in front of any of the other astronauts, but he took the system offline just to be safe. If an astronaut had just started, they would postpone, and they could swap out the hologram for others with minimal risk, but a few of them would see their training end early. 

He didn’t know the technical aspects of it, but he assumed that the AI engine had reacted to mention of Keith’s prior experience. Shiro had been searching his entire life for people who had experiences like his, or would believe him, at the very least. Once he started making enough money, he wrote to other space organizations to see if they had any people who would aid in his search, but their replies were full of ridicule.

Keith believed. Keith could help.

\---

Day 61: Night

Keith hated the idea of a complete stranger seeing video of himself and Shiro getting down and dirty, but he needed to find out what happened. They were a modern lab, but the archive room was still crammed with boxes and large computers serving as storage units. More efficient technology was available, but they hadn’t transferred the data over yet. 

What they found were gaps in the application’s memory, as if the hologram had intentionally turned the camera off for some parts. Keith saw no evidence that they had been anything but professional.

Predictive, she had said. And she must have said something to Shiro, because as he was lounging in one of the swivel chairs on the observation deck the next night and Keith walked by, Shiro caught him by the wrist. Keith’s first instinct was to pull away, but he kept his wrist in Shiro’s grasp. 

Pidge had told him, in fact. She found the idea of predictive AI amazing, and if Shiro and Keith did have chemistry, this would be the discovery of a century.

“Do you like stargazing?”

“I do.” He used to do it all the time in hopes that he would see something, but that hope was gone by now. He still liked it, though. 

“Are you in the mood?” Keith wasn’t really, but he took the seat anyway because Shiro seemed like he had something he wanted to say. The egg-shaped chair was padded on the inside and encapsulated him almost completely. He turned away from the room behind him and saw nothing but the sky, and Shiro, seated next to him. 

He was expecting a discussion about the AI, as if Shiro would dwell on all the embarrassing things they did and for some reason want to talk it out.

Instead, Shiro said, “I think--you’re what I need.”

In Shiro’s mind, it was peculiar that a holographic version of himself, even one with extensive programming like the last one, would fall in love with a trainee. If this version of himself picked up on a connection with Keith, he believed it could be real. 

“In what way?”

“If we work together, this search for life outside our solar system could be over within the year.”

Keith doubted that. He doubted that very highly. “It’s May.”

“Well, I have high hopes.”

Keith exploded. “You seriously fucked with my head back there. Are you sure you want to do this? Because I don’t want to be another experiment.” 

“There are answers here that neither one of us can find alone.” Keith turned the chair away and was about to get up, but his legs just wouldn’t do the work. “I’m not saying that we have to be anything more, although I think it would work out if we tried. I just think we should work together.”

“And I would stay here?”

Keith gave it a thought. He graduated from the Garrison, but he came here for answers, not to go to space, as cool as that was. Shiro was offering.

“You don’t have to, but it would be easier.”

Keith took a deep breath and asked the last question that was on his mind.

“And what about...us?”

“We can try it.”

The trainer in the astronaut facility had probably been zeroed out again, memory wiped to prepare for the next person. He hated knowing that the relationship they had created was gone, and he clung to the hope that maybe he could find it again in this person.

Shiro did too.

**Author's Note:**

> This story started out as something completely different


End file.
